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Freshly Exhumed writes with this news (quoting The Guardian): "France runs a vast electronic surveillance operation, intercepting and stocking data from citizens' phone and internet activity, using similar methods to the U.S. National Security Agency's Prism programme exposed by Edward Snowden, Le Monde has reported. An investigation by the French daily [en français;Google translation] found that the DGSE, France's external intelligence agency, had spied on the French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity. The agency intercepted signals from computers and phones in France as well as between France and other countries, looking not so much at content but to create a map of 'who is talking to whom,' the paper said."

Now taking bets on which country will be implicated next in sketchy and/or illegal domestic monitoring.

Post the house odds first, dear... I want to know where Antigua and Barbuda are on the list... because I'm guessing long odds there and I intend to "leak" their intelligence operation to the Washington Post shortly after you put it up.

I suspect most if not all nations do it to some extent, the questions are which ones and to what extent.

...and how many of them profess to be the "Land of the Free".

Every single one of them, with their own choices of words of course.

The USA wasn't always like this, and citizens in general believe the propaganda fed to them and live it as an ideal. But many people believing this scam actually managed to make themselves and their country better.That's why I still sing the national anthem, for those honoring

I suspect most if not all nations do it to some extent, the questions are which ones and to what extent.

...and how many of them profess to be the "Land of the Free".

No that's not the problem. Spying on your citizens is fine. Everybody knows they do it. As usual what gets them in trouble is denying they're doing it. As soon as they were aware that Snowden had the data, which was hopefully before he went public, but who knows, they should have released that they were doing this. People wouldn't have liked it, but it wouldn't be a scandal. It's not the deed that gets you in trouble, its the denial and cover-up.

Speak for yourself. 1984 was never intended to be an instruction manual. Is that really the kind of society you want to live in? Your every communication monitored like you are some kind of lab animal?

Speak for yourself. 1984 was never intended to be an instruction manual. Is that really the kind of society you want to live in? Your every communication monitored like you are some kind of lab animal?

You miss the point. The government is already spying on its people and was doing so long before the information age. Technology has only made it easier. Most people knew or already suspected that. One only has to look at the history of the FBI or McCarthyism to realize that it has been going on in the US ages. However, both the FBI and McCarthyism were more or less public spying. Nobody denied it was going on. The NSA got caught spying on the public after saying they weren't. That is why it is such a scan

That they have done it for a long time doesn't make it right! And even if they have been doing it for a long time, there was an even longer time when they didn't do it. For example the US didn't even have an intelligence agency until after WWII, and in no way was the FBI of 193x and 194x involved in mass surveillance of the public.

That they have done it for a long time doesn't make it right! And even if they have been doing it for a long time, there was an even longer time when they didn't do it. For example the US didn't even have an intelligence agency until after WWII, and in no way was the FBI of 193x and 194x involved in mass surveillance of the public.

I never said or implied it was right, but the outrage that has been expressed isn't that they have been doing it. Everybody knows they have been doing it. The outrage is that they lied and said they weren't doing it and then Snowden released the documents showing they actually were.

As for US intelligence capabilities prior to the WWII and the FBI, you are free to believe what ever you want so you can sleep easy, but the Library of Congress has many volumes documenting what was going on now that much of it h

I doubt there's any that overtly claim to be "land of the slaves and home of the despots."

It's a skewed view of the world to suggest that nations don't cover it up or otherwise obscure what they're doing. The worst nations often times have huge propaganda campaigns to convince the citizenry not to be concerned about it.

I believe the original intent of the GCHQ and NSA was to spy on foreign enemies for the purpose of winning wars either current wars or expected ones. So I don't think just saying, "that's what you pay us to do." would be a very good defense. Unless you want to make it sound like your own citizens are the enemy.

Armed forces are paid to kill, but that doesn't work as an excuse for a Tiananmen Square massacre. "Well you pay us to kill. We were just doing what you pay us for. And I think we did a good job becau

Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".

This principle could be paraphrased as follows: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders'".

According to "The Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA", all that Truman really wanted was a news agency that could give him summaries of political trends in foreign countries so he could make informed decisions in foreign policy.

Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."

Mr. Clapper didn't take that approach because he knows damn well if he told us what he was doing, we'd tell him to stop and/or stop the payments.

Mr. Clapper does not take that approach because he's not allowed to take that approach. Like the Marines, if the NSA is doing something it's because they've been TOLD to do something. (Same for SAS and GCHQ)

You are very, very naive. NSA IS a core part of government and they have a "intelligence" shitpile on EVERY American by now. They decided Obama's shitpile was smelling better than Romney's.

The NSA were just following orders. All the programs you are so scared of now were put in place during a Republican mandate and are only scaled up versions of what they have been doing for decades. I can only speculate why they were allowed to continue.

Complaining that a lawful government agency was following orders and fulfilling a mandate related to national security is naive.

I'm not betting on the German services since they managed to claim for 30 years there's no such thing as right-wing terrorism in Germany. And not huge data gathering clued them in but sheer dumb luck did. Our guys genuinely have no clue whatsoever.

Yet still this is the time to ask in what way this mass trawling for information actually helped preventing any bullshit going down. Sure as hell helped in law enforcement but good old-fashioned targeted information gathering by lawenforcement gets the job done,

I don't care if they see I'm talking to a divorce lawyer or AIDS doctor. Really, the whole world can see this. The websites I visit ? Public knowledge and in no way shameful or compromising. My friends ? All of them ordinary, upstanding guys with no political interests or inclination for subversive activities. It's not like I'm one of those Muslims who are all at 5 degrees of separation to a known terrorist. My day to day location and CCTV images ? Public. My full financial data ? No problem there, I'm 100% free of any tax related problem - I have the tax code memorized (all it's 14K pages). I have nothing to hide !

I have some bad news for you, you are almost certainly within 5 degrees of separation from some "person of interest". Pretty much everyone is. Otherwise why would they have to gather data on everyone.

The problem isn't that this particular set of collected data is or isn't a danger to all of our freedoms. The problem isn't whether or not there is proper oversight for the people conducting the spying. The problem is that this amount of power will inherently lead to corruptions and abuses, and as such, no government can be trusted with it. The very fact that the government felt the need to conduct this spying in secret is ample evidence that their intentions are not on the up and up. If you tell everyone that you are monitoring who they communicate with, then the paranoid people will act to prevent the eavesdropping, but their behavior alone will single them out, giving the would-be-eavesdroppers just as much useful intelligence as having all of that metadata. The idea that the spying has to be secret to be effective is absurd in practice. Since the given reason for the secrecy is false, the only remaining explanations are far more sinister. We now hear that the french are partaking of this level of spying? Is foreign terrorism that big of a threat in France? I suspect that the biggest terrorist threat in France is the same as the US: good old fashioned homegrown whackjobs. No amount of communication surveillance is going to help find and catch the lone bomber, or the dedicated pair of crazies. There are only two uses for that level of survailance: Post-incident investigation (they already admitted that no one looks at the data in real time). And oppression. Just because it makes the investigators jobs easier for the first option doesn't mean its worth risking the second option.

I don't care if they see I'm talking to a divorce lawyer or AIDS doctor. Really, the whole world can see this. The websites I visit ? Public knowledge and in no way shameful or compromising. My friends ? All of them ordinary, upstanding guys with no political interests or inclination for subversive activities. It's not like I'm one of those Muslims who are all at 5 degrees of separation to a known terrorist. My day to day location and CCTV images ? Public. My full financial data ? No problem there, I'm 100% free of any tax related problem - I have the tax code memorized (all it's 14K pages). I have nothing to hide !

Note to poster: there are certain rhetorical devices that are not widely understood by many Slashdotters. Amongst these are irony, sarcasm, satire and facetiousness.

Note to Slashdotters: Irony, sarcasm, satire and facetiousness are described in many places, including Wikipedia. For many of you, a refresher course is recommended.

Great. Just like 4 guys around here. Well, up until they got the security forces storming into their apartments and showing them, their wives and children to the floor with automatic rifles to their back, then dragged away for some time in a cell.

See, some housewife had heard a guy talking on the phone about blowing up a bomb in a mall. So the security police pulled the call records on the nearby cell towers, the housewife identified the talker off a drivers license, tracked down who he'd been talking to an

I suppose it's all on how you define look at. When a machine sucks up a meassage, scans it for keywords, especially in Arabic or Farsi, then records the headers without human intervention, has it been looked at?

Computers are nothing but automated intelligence.If the communications analyst would have dismissed idle chatter and gossip in english, then presumably the software would too.If the Analyst would have been more suspicious of the same content in Arabic then the software would as well.

So yes, computerized analysis counts a being looked at.

But the current thread is about the naivete and self delusion necessary to assume that the entire content of letters, email, voice calls, etc is NOT recorded or even scanned

But the current thread is about the naivete and self delusion necessary to assume that the entire content of letters, email, voice calls, etc is NOT recorded or even scanned, and ONLY metadata is recorded. There isn't shred of evidence to support this view and Snowden and others have specifically stated that it is not so.

True. However, for most purposes they really only want to know who's talking to who. In most cases, drone-strikes can commence based on just that data. Google "Karen Stephenson" and "The Quantum Theory of Trust" to see why all the agencies are on top of this.

Also relevant: "I'm looking for needles in haystacks. So I'm gathering haystacks." - Dutch Intelligence Chief. I guess this would explain their modus operandi as far as the "gathering of data" goes.

The Germans did it first though, with their "Schleppnetzfahndung" (dragnet investigations), in the 1970's. It lead to a lot of innocent people losing their jobs and livelihood due to being suspected of sympathizing with terrorism. I don't need a crystal ball to predict how this round will end, if the crisis continues and people start organizing to put pressure on their local rulers. The gloves *will* come off in that case.

Wow really? Talk about being out to lunch. I'm sure you also believe that they "rigged the election." As a fun and useful note, the only side that was actually charged with that one was the Liberals. And seeing as how the case with regards to the conservatives went all the way to the supreme court(which is stacked with liberal appointees) and found some, but no total evidence. Well I guess that's that.

I'd also hazard you're one of the line9 nutbars while we're at it. Who believes that oil flowing in t

From your posting history you seem sane and well-balanced, so you probably want to avoid rants about neocons. The neoconservative [wikipedia.org] movement is primarily about using US military force to actively make the world a better place (in their eyes) with a strong pro-Israel focus on the Middle East. They are thus strongly identified with Israel, and those who rant against neocons are very often strongly anti-Semitic losers who have discovered that if they say "neocon" instead of "Jew" people will actually listen to

In Canada, the politics of the Conservative Party take on many of the features of the governments of Bush and Reagan, which is why I use the label. I do not intend to imply anything to do with international relations or make any racial or religious accusations; while he does seem to hold a strong pro-Israel perspective, I don't consider this important, and I suppose in retrospect this is probably a misuse of the label on my part.

The comparisons I actually wanted wanted to draw were the following: he's been

Everyone is doing it. It must be ok then... so move along, "don't rock the boat - keep your head down Just another fool in the crowd"...

/sarcasm

I have little doubt that each country has a specific legal regime that enables their intelligence agencies to engage in their work in a manner that is lawful to their own country. As is repeatedly pointed out on Slashdot, Europeans are not under American law. By the same token, Americans are not under European law. And Germans are not under British law. The French are not under Swedish law...... Feel free to mentally complete the combinatorial exercise.

This has been known publicly since the release of the book the Sword and the Shield in the 1990s, and well-known by most larger companies since well before that even. We're persecuting Snowden for being the Captain Obvious of the intelligence community. "Oh noes! The french are spying on us!" Dude. Fucking duh. The french have been spying on everyone since the dark ages. Hell, where do you think the word sabateur comes from? The french pretty much invented industrial espionage.

In other news... why are we threatening the lives of other countries leaders and going on a mad witch hunt for Snowden, wheeling and dealing in backroom deals reminiscent of the cold war era again? Oh right... because he came forward and confirmed what everyone either already suspected, or knew. Which was only necessary because so many people are living in a level of denial that makes the comment "Windows 8 is the best operating system ever!" look like criticism. -_-

In the early 19th century, before mechanical looms got big, many thousands of people made clothe in their homes, and made a decent wage as skilled workers. Then industrialization happened, Mechanical Looms put almost everyone out of business, and everyone else was making starvation wages so the loom-owners could afford gold-plated carriages.

So some of them took to invading factories and destroying the Looms with their clogs. In French a clog is a "sabot," so this

They're persecuting Snowden for removing plausible deniability. By rubbing everyone's nose in this, the powers that be can no longer make silly hand gestures to the general public and claim "paranoid conspiracy nonsense!" and "that's what you get for believing Hollywood fairy tales".

Of course, the only thing most of the general public is going to bitch about is how the NSA is messing with the voting on American Idol.

I don't think they ever needed it. The NSA, FBI, and CIA know that they have nothing to fear from us. I don't see us rising up in an armed revolt any time soon and that is the only thing that will stop us from reaching the full vision of George Orwell eventually. We are certainly more than halfway there already. As others have pointed out it's probably technology rather than the Patriot Act that is really responsible for this. To think that there are any checks on the power of these spooks is naive to the e

Keep in mind, you have no idea what he hasn't released yet. They might not know what he has either. From the reports I've read he did not have access to some of the systems the data he released came from so either he found some security holes or he had accomplices. In either case he could have access to practically anything and they have no idea what. Their gusto in going after him is very telling indeed. Weather he has it or not, they clearly have something they don't want revealed. The fact that the media

France does have a huge population of immigrants from N. Africa who after escaping their oppressive Third World shitholes, riot and protest in France because they don't like the society they live in or some such non-sense.

It's the same formula - leave oppressive fundamentalist Islamic society for a Western one and then riot because your new country doesn't have oppressive Islamic laws.

For the love of all that is unholy, how the fuck did this go to +2 Insightful? France has a huge population of pretty much any ethnicity you can think of, thanks to aggressive emperialistic aspirations for hundreds of years (Hello, Vietnam war). You're gonna have to either start sharing those 'shrooms you've been gulping, or take it down a notch, you're gonna have a stroke.

Over the last decade or so , there have been quite a few major riots by N. African Muslims in Western Europe - especially France. Most times it's because they are incapbable of living in a Free Secular Western society - a society that treats women as equals.

Or, because they're tired of putting up with racist bullshit and discrimination from bigots like yourself and the AC who started this thread.

France does have some pretty hardcore racists, the National Front party is quite popular. The rioters however are usually second or third generation who complain they aren't being given equal opportunities in employment or education. How true this is I don't know, but having lived in France for quite a while I'd say it's entirely possible.

From what I've seen France really sucks at integrating immigrants. the only French pol I can name with non-French ancestry would be Sarkozy, and Sarko's family has been in the country for roughly a century.

In the US he'd be an old-line blueblood. In France the National Front thought he was un-French.

Europe as a whole seems to suck at integrating immigrants. Which is unfortunate, because basically the entire point of the EU is to allow random Romanians to get jobs in London.

Western Christians who hear a Muslim is angry, and automatically assume said Muslim could only be angry because he's not living under Sharia. That is exactly the same as saying a white Christian who is angry must be angry that the feudal system has been dismantled.

Check out the prosecution of Bouchra Bagour. She has a terrible sense of humor, but if you want to impose Sharia Law on France generally you don't get a middle class office job, dress like a western woman, etc.

The article is worded such that I don't yet understand whether the data was stocked for years (because the directive does impose time limits) or if the program has been going for years which is accurate since the directive was issued in 2006.

Well, duh. Of course they do - this is France, the country that made cryptography illegal [cryptolaw.org] until it was pointed out to them that this was destroying their ability to participate in electronic commerce.

I suppose that they could had intercepted all the communication i sent to france based search engines, social networks and mail servers, if ever happened that. But as im not in france, not even in europe, odds that it happened are pretty low. In the other hand, in US most if not all central internet services are located there, my communication with other regions of the world usually goes thru there, and even if not, they went actively going against networks and services located other countries [scmp.com]. Could be deb

Somebody who believes that Human Rights have legal standing. How cute.

International law is a deal between the 190-odd nation-states of the world. They have agreed to recognize certain rights in solemn treaties that are not actually legally binding. No court in the US is going to invalidate any death penalty on the basis of international law. Many of these states have included some rights in either their domestic law codes or their Constitutions. In both cases any actual legal case involving those rights wil

Keep in mind that if they're reporting on this they're likely privacy advocates, and privacy advocates tend to have a much more expansive view of what is private then the Courts do.

For example state-side you have the right to not talk to the police, but refusing to talk to police can be considered probable cause to get a warrant. It can also be used as evidence against you during your trial. Every privacy advocate hates this, and when the Supremes recently confirmed it there were terrabytes of counter-argum

...which is nothing more than the 10,000th iteration of "nothing to see here, move along" buuuuuuuuullshit concern trolling. Yeah, we really all have heard of Echelon, Stasi, Carnivor, the Great Wall of China, COINTELPRO, etc etc. Really.

Wrong is wrong, it doesn't matter who's doing it, or how long it's been around.

Seems like their shit does stink after all. Gotta love that haughty European hypocrisy, and their outrage over American practices. Of course I expect this sort of thing from politicians and the like, but real people are another story. Certainly not all Europeans are like this, but enough to be annoying. I'm as far as you can get from a wrap yourself in the flag and say everything about America is wonderful type, but I do get sick of "you Americans" type posts. It's especially ironic coming from Britons, con

Apparently you know nothing about Africa. In Sweden/Germany/etc. nobody ever sides with an anti-Democrat against a Democrat just to get another vote in the UN General Assembly. If the guy selling guns to third-world gives bribes in Northern Europe he gets outted by his home country, and the bribee gets to go to jail.

France, OTOH, was recently faced with a situation where the French-allied-government was accused of using hundreds of thousands of Chinese machetes which he intended to hack his political

You do realize that France is not the only country in Europe, right? They have the best cheese and bread and pastries and the prettiest girls and the most beautiful language and overall probably some of the best food if you can afford it, but there are other countries. I mean, they do exist even if they cannot bake a croissant to save their lives.

Long before the Chinese were the country in the hotseat for spying, France and Israel were already established professionals in the industrial espionage arena.

Before traveling overseas in the late 80s and early 90s we got lectures about how the French probably had bugs and cameras in our hotel rooms and that they routinely spied on visitors.

Just like the NSA spying shouldn't have been news, but most people act surprised. Seriously, what's the next headline we're going to wake up to? That the Koch family has been funding a vast propaganda network to influence public opinion? That the Chinese have stolen the design of every nuclear warhead in our arsenal? That Pakistan is giving safe harbor to terrorists? Or the FBI was been tipped off and missed both 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombers?

Yeah. But the French never really hid the fact that they were spying on their own population. Look at their restrictions on encryption and similar technologies and try to come up with alternate justifications.

Fortunately, thanks to France's policies on linguistic purism [wikipedia.org], if you insert a few borrowed English words, the authorities are not allowed to listen.

Which means that now the various government have to spend weeks complaining about each-other's spies, whicl quietly re-assuring everyone nothing's changed, and prying no Wikileaks-type group has evidence they're lying asses off...

I'm guessing the next "revelation" is gonna be that it's really hard to be gay in Africa. The only drawback is that it doesn't embarrass anyone Putin dislikes, therefore it's unlikely to make headlines in Le Monde or the Guardian.

I figure there are a few possibilities. The first, and the one that I favor, is that the CIA or NSA is ultimately responsible for this leak about France. If there's one thing the US needs right now it is to spread the blame. To show that other people are doing the same. To some people that will seem like a valid defense.

A second possibility is that Snowden, despite his predicament, inspired a French agent to do the same, except anonymously. I find this only slightly less probable than the first possibility.

And finally there is the possibility that the timing is a complete coincidence. I think it's more likely that the moon is made of cheese, but I suppose it is not impossible.

Every nation on earth that can spy at any given level does exactly that. This is why you have nation states which have the technological means to spy keeping their mouths shut about the whole Snowden affair. This is also why backwaters like Bolivia and Ecuador are quick to condemn and make an uproar about the whole thing.

Those countries that can spy, do, those that can't, don't - but they would if they could. Why do you think Russia bluntly asked Snowden to stop leaking documents if he wanted asylum? In the

Of course french people should be concerned, but it is worth noting that this is not PRISM: There is no access to Gmail mailboxes for instance. And as a proof the scope is much smaller than NSA's spying is the size of the datacenter, which fits in a building inside Paris.

But while we get upset, we should not miss why this is revealed right now, while it was obviously known for some time, with parliamentary reports dealing about it. IMO the goal is to minimize Snowden's leaks so that everyone forget about hi

Of course french people should be concerned, but it is worth noting that this is not PRISM: There is no access to Gmail mailboxes for instance. And as a proof the scope is much smaller than NSA's spying is the size of the datacenter, which fits in a building inside Paris.

And I'm sure the U.S. having almost five times the population of France, and being such a major hub for world Internet activity, has nothing to do with that...

I did not say anything else. If we limit the discussion to telecom metadata retention, I understand the difference is that US spies the world while France mostly spies its own citizen. That is a few billions against a few millions, hence the difference of datacenter size.

There the Informatique et Libertés law, that gives you the right to access the data about you, and request them to be corrected or deleted. But as TFA says, that program is in the murky waters of national security, and it is not obvious if security prevail over that law or not. I understand we need someone to go to a court to know.